Clickable lets small businesses go beyond Google’s search ads

For many small businesses, Google’s AdWords product may be their only online marketing channel. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, New York City startup Clickable introduced its Master Campaign tool, which the company claims is the first product to allow for campaign management across Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing.

The product will let businesses create ads and target users across multiple platforms with a simple interface. According to company CEO David Kidder, people don’t have the time to learn a new ad-placement system, which leads them to put all their resources into Google campaigns using the familiar AdWords interface. Kidder thinks the Master Campaign will change that.

Clickable’s tool is focused on professional services like doctors, dentists, and lawyers. Someone mentioning that they just got divorced, for instance, would be served an ad for a divorce attorney, while someone mentioning credit-card debt might be served an ad for cheap bankruptcy advice. Kidder said the data Clickable has collected on these types of ads allows them to detect users’ intent on social sites like Facebook in ways that might not be obvious to people used to the simple keyword matching used in search ads.

“You can’t do this for all advertisers only for verticals which you have data for,” Kidder mentioned. “The question is not whether I can translate my keyword success on to my keyword success in Facebook. It’s not a lateral thing.”

Clickable is planning on bringing its platform to Twitter in the near future, Kidder told VentureBeat: “I think we’ll be the first one to do it.”

Kidder attributes Clickable’s success to taking the hassle out of advertising.

“Real businesses are painkillers, not vitamins,” Kidder said. “We are the most important painkiller in online advertising because we’re taking away the time and complexity.”

Clickable was founded in 2006 and has received funding from Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, and Firstmark Capital. The company is actively hiring, Kidder said.